Hypochondria and other news

The Knaresborough Post reports that Holy Trinity Church at Little Ouseburn - the church Anne attended while working for the Robinson family - will be open for viewing as part of the Heritage Open Days.

As part of this year's Heritage Open Days, two churches in Knaresbrough and Ouseburn will be open for viewing in this area. [...]
Heritage Open Days are held every September in towns and cities throughout England and celebrate architecture and culture by allowing visitors free access to interesting properties. The weekend started in 1994 and is now England's biggest and most popular vountary cultural event. Last year it attracted around a million visitors. [...]
Holy Trinity Church in Little Ouseburn is also open at the weekend on both Saturday, September 12 and Sunday, September 13 from 10am till 4pm as part of the Heritage Weekend.
The Grade I building is set in a conservation area overlooking parkland and has historic links with St Bega, Fountains Abbey, the Civil War, Anne Bronte, the Newby Ferry Disaster and the Canadian Airforce.
Mentioned in the Doomsday book, much of the history of the building since Norman times can be read in the structure itself.
A DVD will be playing by Jim Lang of English Heritage plus visitors can enjoy displays of documents and photos gathered through the years.
Attendants will be on hand to answer any queries.
Coffee and cakes will be available on Saturday along with preserves and cards to buy.
The Grade II listed Thompson Family Mausoleum and Undercroft will also be open. (Picture source)

To read more about the Anne Brontë connection, click here.

A couple of newspapers feature Brian Dillon's Tormented Hope. Nine Hypochondriac Lives. Brian Dillon himself writes an article for The Independent:

By the mid-19th century, women such as Charlotte Brontë could also self-diagnose a disease that in its symptoms was perhaps close to what we would today call depression. [...]
Charlotte Bronte: Author
Brontë claimed to have suffered a fit of hypochondria while teaching at Roe Head, Mirfield, West Yorkshire, aged 19. She fell into "a most dreadful doom", which she believed had little to do with the sickly and doomed family milieu in which she lived. Rather, Brontë meant by "hypochondria" a dismal combination of sorrow, worry and resignation that arose, so she thought, from the fact that she now had no time to write or to think. Later, in 'Jane Eyre', she had Rochester accuse Jane of hypochondria when she expressed her fears about their planned wedding. In real life Brontë outlived her five siblings.

And from The Irish Times:

It explores, through the stories of James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol, the relationship between mind and body, and the terror of being ill. [...]
It became quite fashionable in the 18th century during the lifetime of Charlotte Brontë when it was known as the “English malady”. “It becomes a marker of sensitivity,” says Dillon. “That is long gone. It has a psychological and moralised meaning today which we disapprove of.” (Conor Pope)

The 'lifetime of Charlotte Brontë' actually took place in the 19th century.

The Twilight-Wuthering Heights connections goes on endlessly. Woman Up on Politics Daily, Black Book Magazine and Entertainment and Showbiz discuss it.

It is a while since we talked about the Brontë horses, and here Racing and Sports brings a detailed summary of (some of?) them:

One of the Bronte sisters, Emily Bronte, wrote but one book, Wuthering Heights, but it became a literary classic and had its name bestowed on broodmares in New Zealand, the dam of the great galloper Battle Heights and ancestress of many other fine gallopers, and England, a remote relation of Moti.
The English Wuthering Heights was from Anne Bronte, a Fair Trial mare out of Charlotte Bronte, the names of Emily sisters and the seventh and eighth dams of Moti.
Charlotte Bronte was a half-sister to Florence Dombey, dam of Felcrag (GB), grandam of Dickens (Aust) (won the VRC C.B. Fisher Plate, Linlithgow Stakes, STC Rawson Stakes; second Victoria Derby and third AJC Derby) and third dam of Dickens (IRE) (a leading English stayer who won the Goodwood Cup and Yorkshire Cup). (Brian Russell)

Always a - erm - fascinating subject, those Brontës.

On the blogosphere, Wuthering Heights 2009 is reviewed by Three o'clock bears and Critictoo (in French). Ambival posts about another adaptation, Wuthering Heights 1970. And Bokklubben Läslusen writes about the actual novel (in Swedish). Flickr user djp72 has uploaded a small set of Brontë country photographs.

Finally, an alert for those of you in the Boston area today comes from The Boston Globe:

A LIVESEY DISCUSSION
Acclaimed writer Margot Livesey leads a discussion about one of her 19th-century predecessors, Charlotte Bronte, and her classic novel "Jane Eyre," tonight at 7 at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville.

Categories: Alert, Anne Brontë, Books, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights